


Pain

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-29
Updated: 2010-06-29
Packaged: 2017-10-10 07:57:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/97421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It hurts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pain

**Author's Note:**

> This story was first posted March 8, 2005.

It's not that he doesn't feel the pain; he feels it. It hurts. That's what pain is. But the body can accustom itself to anything that doesn't kill it outright, if it goes on long enough. This has gone on more than long enough.

The pain is constant, like gravity. It's as meaningful to ask him how much it hurts as to ask anyone who's lived on Earth all his life how heavy the atmosphere is. He wonders sometimes, on bad nights when the Vicodin's only made him hazy and maudlin instead of unconscious, if this is why babies cry so much: because they are suddenly subject to gravity and still close enough to the womb to remember when they were not. All around them, towering faces exhort them to crawl, to walk, to force their limbs to do things they know perfectly well they once did effortlessly, painlessly. They swam and flew once, and now they drag themselves across hard flat floors and struggle to lift the weight of their own heads.

He doesn't cry; babies wouldn't either, with a valid prescription for Vicodin at hand. He thinks infantile amnesia is a kind of mercy, a protection from unbearable grief. Better to forget weightlessness once you've reached the ground. Still, it horrifies him to find that he is forgetting the absence of pain.

He knows, logically, that there was a time--the majority of his life, in fact--when his leg didn't hurt, when he didn't limp. He remembers doing things that he could not have done with a leg like he has now. But all his memories are overlaid with the same haze of pain that shrouds his present existence; trying to remember a time when his leg did not hurt is like trying to remember what it was like to be unable to read or speak. It's like trying to remember flying.


End file.
